She put the glass down carefully on the low table and pulled herself up from the sofa and walked to the window and stood there with her back to him, her hands on her hips.
"I'm glad the trollop is dead," she said. She let her arms drop to her sides and turned her head and looked at him. "I suppose you think I'm a prize bitch, Mr… What was your name again? Quirke, yes, sorry. And I suppose I am-a bitch, I mean. But she was no better than a whore, and, frankly, I'm happy she's gone."
She frowned then, and tilted her head as if she were listening to something inside herself, then excused herself and brushed past him quickly and left the room. He heard her hurrying upstairs, and a door slamming. He was sitting on a square white chair with his hands on his knees. Slowly the silence congealed around him. The house was like an overgrown dollhouse, with its pale walls and paler furniture, its dainty tables and cubic chairs. The air smelled of nothing. It was like a house that had not been lived in yet. He gazed out at the wet, wind-tossed garden, where the afternoon sunlight dazzled. Upstairs a lavatory flushed, and water gurgled along a grid of pipes. He crept into the hall and was heading for the front door when she appeared above him at the top of the stairs. She had changed into a black polo-necked sweater and black slacks. He stopped, and she came down to him. She had removed her makeup, and her face now had a raw, chalky texture. "Making a break for it, were you?" she asked with an attempt at brightness, then looked aside. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not much of a drinker."
She brought him into the kitchen. Here too all was white plastic and glass and matte-gray steel. He sat on a high stool, leaning an elbow on the tiled countertop while she spooned coffee into a metal percolator with a glass dome and put it on a ring of the gas stove to brew. She had managed somehow to sober up, and in her severe black outfit, which threw her features into sharp relief, she was a different person from the one who had sat draped on the sofa taunting him with her big-boned beauty and almost bragging of the deluge of dirt that had overwhelmed her life.
The water in the percolator came to the boil and began to splutter into the little glass dome. Kate stood with her arms folded, leaning her hip against the stove and studying the toes of the black pumps she had put on in place of the Egyptian sandals. He offered her a cigarette, but she did not take it.
"Have you ever been jealous, Mr. Quirke?" she asked. "I mean really jealous? Jealous not just of something you suspect but of a definite, identifiable person, a face, a body that you know as real, that you can picture, on a bed, doing things. It makes you feel sick, that kind of jealousy, I mean physically sick, all the time, sick like with the worst hangover you ever had. Have you had the misfortune ever to find yourself in that state?"
He had a sudden image of his wife, Delia, before they were married, walking away from him wearing only high-heeled slippers and a pearl necklace and turning to look at him over her shoulder with that cat smile of hers, the barest tip of a pink tongue showing between her scarlet-painted lips.
"No," he said. He noticed he had taken out his mechanical pencil and was fiddling with it. "Not like that."
"What they don't warn you about, the books and so on, is the loneliness. Jealousy makes you feel you're the only person suffering in the entire world, the only person suffering like this, like having a red-hot knife blade lodged in your side, the side where your heart used to be." She smiled that wet-eyed, weepy smile at him again. He pictured himself reaching out and pressing his fingers to her temples and drawing her head slowly towards him and kissing her eyelids, first one, then the other. In the harsh light reflected from the gleaming walls he could see the countless tiny grains of her skin and the faint down on her upper lip.
She turned off the gas and fetched two cups from a cupboard above the stove and set them on the countertop and poured the coffee. "I shouldn't have telephoned her, I suppose," she said. "She was nothing, just another poor bitch on the make, absolutely common, dragged up from the slums." She lifted the cup to her lips and narrowed her eyes against the coffee's heat. "That's another thing they don't tell you, how the other woman-the other woman!-even when you know her, becomes a sort of evil, scheming, irresistible serpent coiled around your life, putting its slime on everything, squeezing the goodness out of everything. In your heart you know she's just a person like any other-like yourself, even-maybe a bit more selfish than most, a bit more ruthless, wanting to have her way, wanting the man she's put her eye on even though he's someone else's husband, but still, just a human being. But you can't allow yourself to admit that. Not if you're to preserve any shred of self-respect." She drank the coffee, sip by sip, grimacing at the scalding heat of it, punishing herself. Quirke watched her. "No," she said, "she has to be a-what do you call it?-a gorgon, something not human, more than human. A devil."
She carried her cup to the plastic-topped table in the middle of the floor and sat down. Quirke looked about. Everything was too clean; the shining cleanliness of these surfaces made something in him cringe. Even the air, the very light in the room, seemed drained of all impurities. Kate saw him looking and read his mind. "Yes, I do a lot of cleaning," she said. "It seems to help."
He went and sat opposite her at the table.
"I'm sorry," he said, not knowing what exactly he was apologizing for.
"I'm too old for this kind of thing, really, I am," she said. She leaned forward, hunching over the coffee cup as if she were suddenly cold. "In two years' time I'll be forty. What man will look at me after that?" She gave a low, mock-mournful laugh, and then, surfacing to another level of sobriety, focused on him suddenly. "Why are you involved in this," she asked, "this grimy little suburban melodrama?"
He lifted one shoulder. "I suffer from an incurable curiosity."
She nodded, as if she considered this a sufficient answer. Another thought struck her. "Are you married?"
"I was. A long time ago. She died."
"Sorry." She did not look it; she looked, with that tightened mouth and narrowed eyes, as if she envied him, having a spouse who was dead. "What happened to her?"
"Childbirth. A fluke, one in ten thousand."
"And the child?"
"She survived."
"A daughter."
"She's twenty-two now. Twenty-three."
"Does she live with you?"
"No."
"Well, at least she doesn't remember. Losing her mother, I mean." Idly she dabbled a fingertip in the ash from his cigarette in the ashtray between them on the table. "I have no child," she said. "Leslie couldn't have any. That was fine by him. He was pleased as Punch when he found out. Handy, I suppose, for"-she made a crooked mouth-" 'getting round the girls,' as he would put it, I've no doubt." She was silent again, but after a moment stirred herself. "What can I tell you, Mr. Quirke? I've no idea what you want to know. And nor have you, so you say. Is there something suspicious about Deirdre Hunt's death? Do you think she was pushed? I'd have done it myself, if…" She stopped, and sat back hard on her chair, making the legs squeal on the tiles. "You don't think Leslie-you don't think Leslie was somehow involved, do you? I mean, you don't think he-?" She laughed. "Believe me, Leslie wouldn't hurt a fly-he'd be afraid it would bite him. Oh, he could be dangerous, if cornered, I know that. But I can't see him pushing a woman into the sea. Leslie, Mr. Quirke"-she reached out and seemed about to touch his hand but then withdrew her fingers-"my poor Leslie has about as much backbone as a sea slug. Sorry-I love him dearly, or used to, God help us, but it's the truth."